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Derrida: Nietzsche and the machine

RB: Irecall that in Of Spirit, in what is an extremely dense and complex passage,you criticize virulently the effects of Heidegger's founding 'spiritualisation'of biological racism. Whereas elsewhere (Spurs) you have recognized a certainnecessity to Heidegger's philosophising gesture - at least concerningNietzsche's empiricism - here the problems of this gesture - as one whichspiritualizes biologism - is explicitly analysed within the political contextof Heidegger's engagement with Nazism. Let me quote the passage in full:Becauseone cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism inits genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by re-inscribing spiritin an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality ofsubjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this programremains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today andfor a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism,to nazism, to fascism etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of thefreedom of the spirit in the name of an axiomatic, for example, that ofdemocracy or 'human rights' - which, directly or not, comes back to thismetaphysics of subjectivity. All the pitfalls of the strategy of establishingdemarcations belong to this program, whatever place one occupies in it. Theonly choice is the choice between the terrifying contaminations it asssigns.Even if all the forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible.The question of knowing which is the least grave of these forms of complicityis always there - its urgency and its seriousness could not be over-stressed -but it will never dissolve the irreducibility of this fact. This fact, ofcourse, is not simply a fact. First, and at least, because it is not yet done,not altogether: it calls more than ever, as for what in it remains to comeafter the disasters that have happened, for absolutely unprecedentedresponsibilities of 'thought' and 'action'... In the rectorship address, thisrisk is not just a risk run. If its program seems diabolical, it is because,without there being anything fortuitous in this, it capitalizes on the worst,that is on both evils at once: the sanctioning of nazism, and the gesture thatis still metaphysical. (Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, Chicago 1989, p.39-40) As Dominique Janicaud has noted in his L'Ombre de cette pensée.Heidegger et la question politique (Grenoble 1990), it would be difficult tofind a greater accusation of Heidegger. My question concerns, however, theso-called 'programme' of logics which you allude to in this passage. I notethat you make a similar, if more local, intellectual gesture in Otobiographiesconcerning the necessary contamination of Nietzsche's text by Nazi ideology.There it is a question of a 'powerful programming machine' which relates,before any human intention or will, the two contrary forces of regeneration anddegeneracy in Nietzsche's early "On the Future of Our EducationalEstablishments", dtermining in advance, before any historical eventuality,that each force reflects, and passes into, into its other. We are here,perhaps, at something like the 'heart' of deconstruction given its concern withwhat you call in 'Violence and Metaphysics' "the lesser violence"(Writing and Difference, note 21, p. 313)

Myquestion, after this necessary preamble, is short: in what sense have, for you,all thought and all action up to today been inscribed within this machine? And,how do you understand those enigmatic words 'absolutely unprecedentedresponsibilities' of thought and action? In what sense, 'absolutely'?

JD:First, I certainly believe that the contaminations discussed in this passageare absolutely undeniable. I defy anyone to show a political discourse or posturetoday which escapes this law of contamination. The only way to do so is in theform of (de)negation (Verneinung), the law of contamination can only be(de)negated. If it is true that these contaminations are inevitable, that onecannot side-step its law whatever one attempts to do, then responsibilitycannot consist in denying or (de)negating contamination, in trying to 'save' aline of thought or action from it. On the contrary, it must consist in assumingthis law, in recognizing its necessity, in working from within the machine, byformalizing how contamination works and by attempting to act accordingly. Ourvery first responsibility is to recognize that this terrifying programme is atwork everywhere and to confront the problem head-on; not to flee it by denyingits complexity, but to think it as such.

Second,this means that the political gestures which one will make will, like allpolitical gestures, be accompanied necessarily by discourse. Discursivity takestime, it implies several sentences, it cannot be reduced to a single moment orpoint. On each occasion one will have to make complex gestures to explain thatone is acting, despite contamination, in this particular way, because onebelieves that it is better to do this rather than that, that a particular actchosen is in such and such a situation more likely to do such and such thananother possible act. These gestures are anything but pragmatic, they arestrategic evaluations which attempt to measure up to the formalisation of themachine. To make such evaluations, one has to pass through thought - there isno distinction here between thought and action, these evaluations are actionsof thought. Whoever attempts to justify his political choice or pursue apolitical line without thought - in the sense of a thinking which exceedsscience, philosophy and technics - without thinking what calls for thinking inthis machine, this person isn't being, in my eyes, politically responsible.Hence one needs thought, one needs to think more than ever. Thinking's tasktoday is to tackle, to measure itself against, everything making up thisprogramme of contamination. This programme forms the history of metaphysics, itinforms the whole history of political determination, of politics as it wasconstituted in Ancient Greece, disseminated throughout the West and finallyexported to the East and South. If the political isn't thought in this radicalsense, political responsibility will disappear. I wouldn't go so far as to saythat this thought has become necessary only today; rather, today more thanever, one must think this machine in order to prepare for a political decision,if there is such a thing, within this contamination. Very simply, then, whatI'm trying to do is to prepare for such a decision by tackling the machine orlaw of contamination. For reasons that should now be clear, what I say isalways going to run the risk of being taken in an unfavourable light, it cannotfail to lead to misunderstandings, according to the very same law ofcontamination. There's no way out. As to the criticisms of deconstructionbrought up earlier, one has indeed to assume the risk of being misunderstood,continuing to think in modest terms what is after all exceedingly ambitious, inorder to prepare for these responsibilities - if they exist.

In thepassage you quote I call these responsibilities "unprecedented"(inédites). What does this term mean? In your terms, what is their 'time'?Rather than implying a heroic pathos of originality, the term testifies to thefact that we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. After recent events- whether one gives them the name of Nietzsche, of Heidegger, of the SecondWorld War, of the Holocaust, of the destructibility of humanity by its owntechnical resources - it is clear that we find ourselves in an absolutelyunprecedented space. For this space one needs equally unprecedented reflectionson responsibility, on the problematics of decision and action. To say this isnot a piece of speculative hubris. It simply acknowledges where we are. We needthe unprecedented; otherwise there will be nothing, pure repetition... Theunprecedented is, of course, very dangerous. Once on these paths of thought,one is liable to get shot at by people who are in a hurry to interpret texts,who call you a neo-Nazi, a nihilist, a relativist, a mysticist, or whatever.But if one doesn't take such risks, then one does nothing, and nothing happens.What I'm saying is very modest: without risk, there is nothing.

RB: Whydid you write "absolutely unprecedented"?

JD: Itwas just a form of emphasis. Of course, the unprecedented is never possiblewithout repetition, there is never something absolutely unprecedented, totallyoriginal or new; or rather, the new can only be new, radically new, to theextent that something new is produced, that is, where there is memory andrepetition. The new cannot be invented without memory or repetition. So, twothings: first, there can be no break, no experience of the break which does notpresuppose a non-break, which does not presuppose memory. Second, contaminationfollows from this iterability which is constitutive of the unprecedented.Contamination happens because iterability inhabits from the very first what isnot yet thought. One has to confront this paradoxical logic to be able to thinkthe unthought.

(...)R.B.: Howdoes a certain affirmation of technology relate to what you have called in TheOther Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe "the promise ofdemocracy"? I recall that for Nietzsche democracy is the modern reactivefate of calculative reason and that for Heidegger (both 'early' and 'late'Heidegger) democracy is "inadequate to confront the challenges of ourtechnological age" (Spiegel interview of 1966). In distinction, anddifferently, to both Nietzsche and Heidegger, your work can be seen to affirmboth technology and democracy. Although the promise of democracy is not thesame as either the fact of democracy or the regulative idea (in the Kantiansense) of democracy, deconstruction does "hear" differance more in ademocratic organisation of government than in any other political model; andthere are no new models to be invented. If I understand you correctly, youraffirmation of democracy is, in this respect, a demand for the sophisticationof democracy, such a refinement taking advantage, in turn, of the increasinglysophisticated effects of technology. I pose the above question, then, with thefollowing points in mind. First of all, democratic institutions are becomingmore and more unrepresentative in our increasingly technicised world - hence,in part, recent rejections of "la classe politique", not only inFrance and the United States; the anxieties which the question of a centralisedEuropean government raise form part of the same rejection. Then, in the secondplace, the media are swallowing up the constitutional machinery of democraticinstitutions, furthering thereby the de-politicisation of society and thepossibility of populist demagogy. Thirdly, resistance to this process oftechnicisation is at the same time leading to virulent forms of nationalism anddemagogy in the former Soviet empire, forms which are exploiting technology inthe domains of the media, telecommunications and arms, whilst denying thede-localising effects of technology, culturally, in the domain of ideology.And, finally, the rights of man would seem an increasingly ineffective set ofcriteria to resist this process of technicisation (together with its possiblefascistic effects) given this process's gradual effacement of the normative andmetaphysical limit between the human and the inorganic.

J.D.:Your question concerns the contemporary acceleration of technicisation, therelation between technical acceleration (acceleration through, and of,technics) and politico-economic processes. It concerns in fact the very conceptof acceleration. First, it's more than clear the idea of the acceleration ofhistory is no longer today a topos. If it's often said that history is goingquicker than in the past, that it is now going too quickly, at the same timeit's well-known today that acceleration - a question of rhythm and of changesof rhythm - doesn't simply affect an objective speed which is continuous andwhich gets progressively faster. On the contrary, acceleration is made up ofdifferences of rhythm, heterogeneous accelerations which are closely related tothe technical and technological developments you are alluding to. So, it makesno sense to "fetishise" the concept of acceleration: there isn't asingle acceleration. There are in fact two laws of acceleration: one derivesfrom the technosciences, it concerns speed, the prodigious increase in speed,the unprecedenced rhythms which speed is assuming and of which we are dailyfeeling the effect. The political issues which you evoke bear the stamp of thisform of acceleration. The second is of a quite different order and belongs tothe structure of decision. Everything that I was saying earlier can now be saidin these terms: a decision is taken in a process of infinite acceleration.

Second,taking into account these two laws of acceleration which are heterogeneous andwhich capitalise on each other, what's the situation today of democracy?"Progress" in arms-technologies and media-technologies isincontestably causing the disappearance of the site on which the democraticused to be situated. The site of representation and the stability of thelocation which make up parliament or assembly, the territorialisation of power,the rooting of power to a particular place, if not to the ground as such - allthis is over. The notion of politics dependent on this relation between powerand space is over as well, although its end must be negotiated with. I am notjust thinking here of the present forms of nationalism and fundamentalism.Technoscientific acceleration poses an absolute threat to Western-styledemocracy as well, following its radical undermining of locality. Since therecan be no question of interrupting science of the technosciences, it's a matterof knowing how a democratic response can be made to what is happening. Thisresponse must not, for obvious reasons, try to maintain at all costs the lifeof a democratic model of government which is rapidly being made redundant. Iftechnics now exceeds democratic forms of government, it's not only becauseassembly or parliament is being swallowed up by the media. This was already thecase after the First World War. It was already being argued then that the media(then the radio) were forming public opinion so much that public deliberation andparliamentary discussion no longer determined the life of a democracy. And so,we need a historical perspective. What the acceleration of technicisationconcerns today is the frontiers of the nation-state, the traffic of arms anddrugs, everything that has to do with inter-nationality. It is these issuewhich need to be completely reconsidered, not in order to sound the death-knellof democracy, but in order to rethink democracy from within these conditions.This rethinking, as you rightly suggested earlier, must not be postponed, it isimmediate and urgent. For what is specific to these threats, what constitutesthe specificity of their time or temporality, is that they are not going towait. Let's take one example from a thousand.

It isquite possible that what is happening at present in former Yugoslavia is goingto take place in the Ukraine: a part of the Ukrainian Russians are going to bere-attached to Russia, the other part refusing. As a consequence, everythingdecided up to now as to the site and control of the former Soviet Empire'snuclear arms will be cast in doubt. The relative peace of the world could beseverely endangered. As to a response, one that is so urgently needed, that'sobviously what we've been talking about all along. And yet, it's hardly in aninterview that one can say what needs to be done. Despite what l've just said -even if it is true that the former polarity of power is over with the end ofthe Cold War, and that its end has made the world a much more endangered place- the powers of decision in today's world are still highly structured; thereare still important nations and superpowers, there are still powerfuleconomies, and so forth.

Giventhis and given the fact that, as l've said, a statement specific to aninterview cannot measure up to the complexity of the situation, I would venturesomewhat abstractly the following points. Note, firstly, that I was referringwith the example of the Ukraine to world peace, I was not talking in localterms. Since no locality remains, democracy must be thought today globally (defacon mondiale), if it is to have a future. In the past one could always saythat democracy was to be saved in this or that country. Today, however, if oneclaims to be a democrat, one cannot be a democrat "at home" and waitto see what happens "abroad". Everything that is happening today -whether it be about Europe, the GATT, the Mafia, drugs, or arms - engages thefuture of democracy in the world in general. If this seems an obvious thing tosay, one must nevertheless say it.

Second,in the determination or behaviour of each citizen or singularity there shouldbe present, in some form or other, the call to a world democracy to come, eachsingularity should determine itself with the sense of the stakes of a democracywhich can no longer be contained within frontiers, which can no longer belocalised, which can no longer depend on the decisions of a specific group ofcitizens, a nation or even of a continent. This determination means that onemust both think, and think democracy, globally. This may be somethingcompletely new, something that has never been done, for we're here talking ofsomething much more complex, much more modest and yet much more ambitious thanany notion of the universal, cosmopolitan or human. I realise that there is somuch rhetoric today - obvious, conventional, reassuring, determined in thesense of without risk - which resembles what l'm saying. When, for example, onespeaks of the United Nations, when one speaks in the name of a politics thattranscends national borders, one can always do so in the name of democracy. Onehas to make the difference clear, then, between democracy in this rhetoricalsense and what l'm calling a "democracy to come". The differenceshows, for example, that all decisions made in the name of the Rights of Manare at the same time alibis for the continued inequality between singularities,and that we need to invent other concepts than state, superstate, citizen, andso forth for this new International. The democracy to come obliges one tochallenge instituted law in the name of an indefinitely unsatisfied justice,thereby revealing the injustice of calculating justice whether this be in thename of a particular form of democracy or of the concept of humanity. Thisdemocracy to come is marked in the movement that has always carried a presentbeyond itself, makes it inadequate to itself, "out of joint"(Hamlet); as I argue in Specters of Marx, it obliges us to work with thespectrality in any moment of apparent presence. This spectrality is very weak;it is the weakness of the powerless, who, in being powerless, resist thegreatest strength.